Crafting and the crafting skill

How a crafted item gets its stats

The blueprint sets the floor. Craft from a 150 armor Rex Saddle blueprint and you get at least 150 armor, every time.

Crafting skill adds a random bonus on top, but only to what the blueprint adds over the base item. A Rex Saddle's base armor is 25, so a 150 armor blueprint carries 125 armor of bonus stats. Your crafting skill multiplies that 125, not the full 150.

That also means a blueprint at base stats gets nothing. We crafted 100 saddles from a 25 armor blueprint with 100 points in crafting skill. All 100 came out at exactly 25 armor.

The bonus hits every stat the blueprint improves, armor and durability alike. A few stats can't be crafted up at all. An Electric Prod is one charge, no matter what.

What each point of crafting skill does

Each point gives you two things:

• +10% crafting speed
• +0.5% to the most your bonus can roll

The speed only works in your own inventory, and Focal Chili is the same. At 100 points a 5 second Cloth Shirt crafted in under half a second there, and in 2.5 seconds with Focal Chili alone, but a Smithy took 5 seconds either way (tested on ASA 93.38).

At 100 points your bonus rolls anywhere from 0 to 50%. At 244 points it goes up to 122%.

The roll is even across that whole range. A craft near the top is just as likely as one near the bottom, so your average craft lands at half your max. More points raise the ceiling. They don't guarantee a good roll.

Here's what that looked like in our test: 100 points, Rex Saddle blueprints from 75 to 150 armor, hundreds of crafts each:

Blueprint quality sets the cost, not the result

The quality color on a blueprint changes how many resources a craft costs. It does not change what comes out. Two blueprints with the same stats craft the same range of items, whatever their color. Judge a blueprint by its stats, not its color.

Myths

Focal Chili makes better items. It doesn't. Focal Chili gives +100% crafting speed and +25% movement speed for 15 minutes. That's it. We tested it at 244 points: the bonus range was identical with and without it. Eat it to craft faster in your own inventory. A station ignores it.

Crafting skill helps anything you craft. Only blueprints. Craft from a learned engram and you get the base item, no bonus, at any skill level. We tested this at 244 points.

The bonus multiplies the whole stat. Only the part the blueprint adds over base. See the 25 armor saddle test above.

Where you craft changes the stat bonus. It doesn't. Inventory, smithy, fabricator, replicator: the bonus works the same.

Crafting skill is useless. Not quite. From a learned engram it adds nothing to stats, only speed, and only in your own inventory. On a weak blueprint it adds a little: our 50 armor saddle blueprint topped out at 62. On a good blueprint it's worth it: our 150 armor blueprint crafted up to 212.

When to put points into crafting skill

The payoff scales with two things: how good your blueprint is and how many points you have. Every point counts the same, so the more you plan to craft from strong blueprints, the more it pays to put everything into crafting skill for that session with a Mindwipe Tonic, then respec back when you're done.

Official servers: breakpoints to hit the cap

Our cluster has no item stat caps. Your crafts go as high as they roll.

Official servers cap armor and damage. On a Rex Saddle, the armor cap is 124. On most weapons, the damage cap is 298%. Here's how many crafting points it takes to reach the cap. "Can hit" means your best roll reaches it. "Usually hits" means an average roll does.

Flak and Tek armor work the same way. Every Flak piece has 100 base armor and caps at 496. Every Tek piece has 180 base armor and caps at 714.6. Helmet, chestpiece, leggings, gauntlets and boots all share the same numbers.

The cap depends on the item's base stats, so other saddles and armor land at different numbers. Pick your item in the crafting calculator and switch it to Official to see yours.

Open the crafting calculator